RIP Jimmy Carter

An unquestionably good man.

 

Was out playing tennis when my phone blew up. Boss has me doing the late news tonight because I’m an old man.

I’ve had this obit ready to go in my head for a decade. I hope it does Mr. Carter’s legacy justice.

 

Also begat what became "Nightline."

 

He was the political version of Don Morton at Wisconsin. Great record at the lower levels of Tulsa and NDSU.

Just too much damn dysfunction as he tried to run the veer in D.C.

 

My parents, aunts/uncles, etc. always did a gag gift Christmas present exchange back in the '70s. The stuff usually came from Spencer's in the mall. One year, my mom or dad got a Jimmy Carter doll. He was wearing a kilt with a slit in the front. When you mashed down on Carter's head, a peanut boner emerged from the kilt. I just got rid of it in the last year or so. We also had an inflatable Weeble version of Nixon you could kick over and it pop back up.

 

As noted uptopic, the author of the WaPo obit died 10 years ago. And I still see Bob Thomas bylines on AP entertainment obits even though he's long gone. Unless ...

 

Short obit jack: The NY Daily News obit on Muhammad Ali was written by Bill Gallo, who died 5-6 years before Ali.

 

I'm guessing it's a lock that Stinky will be a hard disinvite.

 

Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us

The decades that followed have shown that Mr. Carter had the diagnosis right. Materialism has become epidemic — endemic, even. We mostly fail to ask ourselves one searching, overarching question: How much is enough?

Mr. Carter misread the nation in thinking that we would look within and without and then answer. In fact, there is little about our patterns since his address to suggest that we wish to earn, own and consume less, or that we have awakened to the fact that having, buying and using more may fail to make us happier.

Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half.

 

I give Carter credit, then and now, for having the guts and nuts for going forward with the hostage rescue mission. Nothing is 100 percent fail-safe, and it wasn't his fault things unraveled on the way to the hostage site. Carter would be revered for that alone had it worked, and it was the right call anyway. Americans were screaming for action, and then they turned on Carter when it broke down before the Big Payoff. ... Shame on us.